On Mon, May 30, 2016 at 11:14:46AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote: > From: Michal Hocko <[email protected]> > > __GFP_REPEAT has a rather weak semantic but since it has been introduced > around 2.6.12 it has been ignored for low order allocations. > > PGALLOC_GFP uses __GFP_REPEAT but none of the allocation which uses > this flag is for more than order-2. This means that this flag has never > been actually useful here because it has always been used only for > PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY requests.
I hear what you say, but... commit 8c65da6dc89ccb605d73773b1dd617e72982d971 Author: Russell King <[email protected]> Date: Sat Nov 30 12:52:31 2013 +0000 ARM: pgd allocation: retry on failure Make pgd allocation retry on failure; we really need this to succeed otherwise fork() can trigger OOMs. Signed-off-by: Russell King <[email protected]> and that's the change which introduced this, and it did solve a problem for me. So I'm not happy to give an ack for this change unless someone can tell me why adding __GFP_REPEAT back then had a beneficial effect. Maybe there was some other bug in the MM layer in 2013 which this change happened to solve? -- RMK's Patch system: http://www.armlinux.org.uk/developer/patches/ FTTC broadband for 0.8mile line: currently at 9.6Mbps down 400kbps up according to speedtest.net.
